Sunday, February 7, 2016

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Costume Design

Sandy Powell's costumes for Cinderella are bold, brilliant, and beautiful.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Costume Design

As with production design, the Academy likes its costumes
big, flashy, and period, plus a whole lot of them. If you designed a historical
monarch’s royal court, so much the better for your chances of going home with
an Oscar. That is no exaggeration. Just in recent history, during a stretch
from 2006-2009, the winners of Best Costume Design were: Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth:
The Golden Age, The Duchess, and The Young Victoria.

Diving deeper into this, just one film in the last 30 years
has won for contemporary costumes. That was The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in 1994, which certainly
qualifies as flashy, if nothing else. Other than that, it is fantasy or period
all the way down the line, either of which could describe every single nominee
this year. The most likely winner, i.e., the one that checks the most boxes: a
period fantasy with a massive royal ball as its centerpiece.

Cinderella – Director Kenneth Branagh’s Disney adaptation was a
surprise hit last spring, pulling down huge numbers at the box office for a
decades-old property with limited appeal outside its core demographic. The
reason, best as I can tell, is that it is actually pretty good. While audiences
get bombarded with gritty reboots of every fairytale under the sun, Branagh and
company play it straight with the simple fable of an abused girl who finds
strength and love.

In this case, playing it straight means hewing very closely
to the Disney animated version of the story, and Branagh takes the central
ball, where Cinderella dances with her prince, and turns it into a visual
extravaganza. Every element is simply stunning, but Sandy Powell’s costume
designs are impossibly beautiful. Powell draws from cultures around the globe
to give each princess from a different land a specific identify, and she has
some fun inserting ball-gown versions of classic Disney princess costumes in
among the extras.

Of course, the real treat is Cinderella’s iconic blue dress,
a feat of costuming that boggles the mind. The colors are lush and vibrant, and
the fabric is adorned with 10,000 Swarovski crystals, each hand placed. The
point of the dress is to turn heads at the ball, and it sure does that. When
one remembers the same care and thought went into clothing the hundreds of
extras in the scene, the herculean nature of the task becomes clear, and that
is not even accounting for the rest of the film’s equally impressive work.

Carol – Powell’s biggest competition this year may come from
herself for designs that could not be more different from the fairytale work she
pulled off in Cinderella. The
costumes in the 1950s-set Carol are
instantly character defining. When Cate Blanchett walks onscreen as Carol, with
her fur coat or red jacket, we know immediately who this woman is. From the
vests, scarves, and hats to the women’s dresses and men’s suits, Powell’s
nuanced designs are a wonder to behold but never overtly call attention to
themselves within the film’s muted color scheme and dingy aesthetic.

Only four designers have more nominations in this category
than 12-time nominee Powell, and only four designers have more wins than Powell’s
three. Her first nomination came in 1993 for the British dramatic fantasy Orlando, and her most recent nod came
for Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 2011.
She won for the aforementioned The Young
Victoria, Scorsese’s The Aviator,
and Best Picture winner Shakespeare in
Love. With the two strongest contenders in the race this year, she seems
almost certain to add a fourth Oscar to her mantelpiece.

The Danish Girl – Director Tom Hooper’s biopic of transgender
pioneer Lili Elbe is an inspired nomination in the category since so much of
Lili’s early transition in the film is told through her clothing choices. As
Lili comes more and more into her own as a person, her clothes become
increasingly feminine until finally she does away with all of her male
garments. Designer Paco Delgado also has the opportunity to explore a number of
different styles within the film’s 1920s setting as Lili’s story takes her from
Denmark to France to Germany, each with its own specific set of cultural
markers.

Delgado is a two-time nominee who was previously nominated
for his work on Hooper’s Les Miserables.
Both films stand out on Delgado’s résumé, which is populated primarily by
contemporary Spanish and Latin America cinema with directors such as Pedro
Almodóvar and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Appropriately, however, a number of
those films also deal with themes of gender, identity, and transformation.

Mad Max: Fury Road – The least traditional work in the category
this year comes from another titan of costume design, Jenny Beavan, a 10-time
nominee whose early career was defined by her work on Merchant-Ivory productions
such as The Remains of the Day, Howards End, and A Room with a View. She earned nominations for all three of those
films and won her only Oscar for A Room
with a View. Her most recent nomination came in 2010 for the Best Picture
winner The King’s Speech.

This time, Beavan steps way outside her perceived comfort
zone of reserved period work with the punk-rock insanity that colors every
corner of Mad Max: Fury Road. From
the peasants to the warriors, Beavan has an instinctive feel for the way this
post-collapse world has forced the people to cobble together clothes from
whatever was left lying around the wasteland. While working essentially with
just one or two colors, Beavan establishes the characters with little details
such as the bric-a-brac that adorns the dusty clothing and various degrees of
decay into which the wardrobes have fallen. This film would be an unconventional
winner in the category but certainly not undeserving

The Revenant – Another film with an extremely limited color
scheme, The Revenantrequires designer Jacqueline West to
create something out of virtually nothing. Working with almost exclusively grays
and browns, West piles on the furs and hides to establish a very specific kind
of Old American West. Her designs have the same naturalistic feel of so much of
the film and seem to be pulled directly from nature itself.

West is a three-time nominee who has never won the award.
Her previous nominations came for more traditional work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Quills, and like so many of Iñárritu’s other collaborators on The Revenant, she has a long history
with director Terrence Malick. West’s designs for The Revenant are impressive and certainly further the thematic
explorations of the plot, but the costumes may not be flashy enough to pull off
a win. Even in years when one film dominates the crafts categories, Best
Costume Design still tends to go to work that screams out for recognition.

The final analysis

This is Powell vs. Powell, and either film could win. A
number of pundits are predicting Carol
to walk away with the award, mostly based on the film’s overall popularity with
the Academy. This is a fair point as the film does have six total nominations
to Cinderella’s one. However, I would
look at the fact that Carol failed to
make it into the Best Picture lineup as evidence of slight weakness with voters.
Cinderella on the other hand is a
popular Disney adaptation with the exact kind of costume work that usually wins
in this category. Neither win would shock me, but it is hard to bet against the
brightest, boldest work of the lot.